Line of Fire
by ClancyEnthusiast
Summary: A freighter bound for the English coast is spotted by the Special Intelligence Service, loaded with more radiation than Chernobyl. The British government deploys a team of highly trained SAS commandos to stop it, before disaster strikes. Oneshot; violent.


A/N: This is the kind of messed up s*** you get when you're half-asleep at four in the morning after playing a round of Rainbow Six on your computer. But I _just _got Modern Warfare, and since I love the SAS you can just imagine how cool I thought the first mission was. So here's a cool little rendition based on the first "real" mission of Call of Duty 4, featuring some of Tom Clancy's great characters from the Rainbow Six novel. (Anybody who seriously reads military fiction should pick it up. Really great read, just riveting.) But I swear, Infinity Ward ripped Captain Price off of Rainbow Six, since the novel from back in 1998 featured one Eddie Price, a color sergeant in the SAS who ends up working for Ding Chavez. Video game bastards. Anyway, enjoy this impressively violent little action-packed oneshot, my little gift to the FF readers after such a long period of inactivity.

* * *

His only gripe about the ride was the size of the Night Hawk's cabin. The MH-60K helicopter was much too small for any stretching of any kind, and Color Sergeant Eddie Price of the 22nd SAS regiment was terrified that his leg might fall asleep. Everything else was fine. The pilot did a superb job of maintaining a smooth ride in the storm, and everyone was sure to keep quiet. Nobody ever talked during insertion, as if worried that the bad guys would hear them.

It was a quick hit and run mission. The Secret Intelligence Service had spotted a freighter with a much higher than normal radiation level approaching the English coast at gradually heightened speeds. The estimation was about twenty-three minutes until collision. Price's team had been assembled at the last minute to run interdiction aboard the vessel—the _Trego_. Their mission was simple, yet dangerous. Objective one was to change the ship's course to prevent collision. Objective two was to sabotage the _Trego_'s engines. There was no intelligence on the crew or anybody else on board. Thermal satellite imaging was impossible, thanks to the ship's incredibly high heat signature. It was unnerving. They were going into a hostile environment with no knowledge of opposition or resistance. Price almost wished he'd taken the chance to go back home for the weekend. It was missions like this which he dreaded.

"We're getting closer!" The pilot shouted over the storm. "ETA in about forty seconds!"

The flight technician readied the nylon rope. Price's team was going to fast-rope onto the bow of the ship and make their way towards the superstructure. They'd have to get to the bridge in order to accomplish objective one, and then they'd head down through the cargo hold to kill the engines. They couldn't use any kind of explosives, lest they detonate whatever it was that was making the _Trego_ light up like a Christmas tree. They would have to improvise.

"Sergeant Price, get ready!"

Eddie nodded and got up from his seat. Moving to the right side of the cabin to the sliding door, Price reached outside and grabbed the rope with both hands. He would be moving in first, as the team leader, with his teammates right behind him. He could see the ship now, the lightning rendering it an eerie cast-shadow against the night sky. It was closer than it appeared.

"Go! Go! Go!"

Leaping out of the helicopter, Price slid all the way down the rope, feeling the friction warm his hands like a struck match. Seconds later his boot touched the bow of the _Trego_, and the color sergeant moved away from the now dangling rope. Drawing his MP5SD submachine gun, Eddie scanned the area around him for any hostiles. He couldn't see anything with the thick blankets of rain pouring down around him.

Geoffrey Bates was the second one down, and he hit the bow right behind Price. He moved similarly, moving away from the rope and bringing up his submachine gun. The iron sights on top were all but useless in the dead of night, but Bates held the weapon at-the-ready. The third one down was Peter Covington, and after him came Bill Tawney. The insertion took twenty-one seconds. As the last of the team touched down, the Night Hawk was already climbing away in the sky. The thumping of the rotors had barely been perceptible over the raging storm.

Eddie spun the index and ring fingers of his right hand—the hand signal for his team to follow. He sensed them form up behind him, and started moving for the steps that went down onto the deck. Apparently, somebody had noticed their entrance, since halfway down the stairs Price encountered a crewman in a yellow rain poncho carrying an AK-74 automatic rifle. The color sergeant fired a three-round burst at the man as soon as he'd seen him, and absorbed the recoil in his shoulder. The shots were virtually silent with the mixture of the rain hitting the deck and the thunder overhead. Price could more clearly hear the bolt of the submachine gun rotating as each bullet left the weapon.

The impacts were powerful enough to knock the man back as though hit with a murderously hard punch. His body tumbled backwards and sprawled out on the deck, the loaded rifle slipping out of his hand and landing next to his hip. The team moved past his corpse as though it hadn't even been there; the crimson holes in his chest were enough to tell them he was dead.

Slowly they moved through the maze of shipping containers. There was a quarter mile across the deck to reach the superstructure, and Eddie's team covered it in two minutes. Moving around to the starboard side of the superstructure, Price ordered the team to stack up outside the door leading inside.

"All of you, watch your corners." He whispered. "Move on my word. Ready?"

There were nods all around.

"Go!"

Bates turned the wheel and yanked the thick metal door open, allowing Covington to lead them in, submachine gun up. He loosed a three-round burst at a crew member inside and watched his body crumple like a beer can. Tawney followed, with Bates right behind him, and they all fanned out to cover the corridor. The stairs leading up to the bridge was at the end.

"What was that?" A voice asked from somewhere inside.

Price saw him first. The crewman staggered out of his quarters with a pistol in his right hand. He hadn't had enough time to contemplate what he was seeing before three nine millimeter rounds ripped through his head like a melon, painting the wall behind him with gray matter. The handgun—a .45 caliber Browning pistol clattered across the floor as his body slumped sideways.

"Stairway clear!" Bates shouted back at Price, aiming his MP5SD up the stairs. They moved upwards together, covering the four landings in nineteen seconds, and stacking up at the door into the bridge. Price called for a "flash and clear" maneuver, and pulled one of the M82 stun grenades off of his belt, holding it near his face. He gave the order a second later.

Bates turned the wheel and opened the door for Eddie to toss the flashbang in a second later. They all heard the muted detonation as Bates swung the heavy door shut after it, and opened it a second time. This time the SAS commandos filtered into the room, with Price in the lead. There were two crew members inside, both armed. The first one, still disoriented from the abuse of the flashbang, went down instantly as a result of a burst of rounds hitting his face from Price's submachine gun. The second crewman, who they assumed was the captain, tried to a draw his pistol, a Browning Hi-Power, from his belt.

"Drop the gun and get down on your knees!" Price barked at the man, who didn't acknowledge the order. "I will _fucking_ shoot you!"

The captain tried to fire at Price while the multi-colored blobs obstructed his vision, the flash from the M82 burned into his retinas. He felt the impacts on his chest a second later, and slowly the ceiling of the bridge started to appear in his eyesight. He tried to yell in defiance, but he wasn't breathing very well, and when he looked down at his chest all he saw was a bloody mass where his poncho had once been. The last thing he saw was Price looking down on him. "Wrong playground chap." The face told him.

None of them needed to be told that the captain was in whatever place terrorists went to when they died. Price gave the "regroup" signal and looked around the bridge. "Bates, get on the wheel. We need to turn this thing away from home sweet home."

The pilot of the MH-60K Night Hawk looked down and noted the change in the ship's course. It was turning away from the British coast now, and that was good. "They did it. Now all they've got to do is kill the bloody engines and we're good." He eased on the cyclical and kept orbiting the ship at a safe distance. They had enough fuel to stay in the air for an hour, and he was sure their boys would be done by then. And when they were, it would be his job to get them off the damned boat.

Price's team started heading down the stairs moments later, and found their way to the corridor they'd entered through. The stairway leading down into the cargo hold was on the opposite end of the hallway, and they still had to sabotage the engines to make sure the ship wouldn't go anywhere. The good news was that no matter what the _Trego_ wasn't going to collide with the western coast of the United Kingdom, and the only people in danger were them. But there was still a possible nuclear threat, and the Royal Navy couldn't

deploy it's submarines to scuttle the freighter until it was stranded in the middle of the Atlantic, well away from anywhere where it might be dangerous.

They soon reached the lower decks, and Price lead his men into the cargo hold. Like the upper deck, it too was dominated by shipping containers, and their path through it was dictated by however they could slip through the spaces between them. They encountered two crewmen inside the cargo hold, both of whom went down without a fight. They found the engine room two minutes after setting foot on the lower deck.

There was one crew member guarding the door. Hidden around the corner, behind one of the shipping containers, Eddie peered around the edge and stared at the man. He was smoking a cigarette, and his AK-74 was propped up against the wall a few feet away from him. It would take the man at least a few seconds for him to fire back, but Price already held his MP5SD at a ready low. Moving around the corner, he raised the submachine gun and let his finger depress on the ambidextrous trigger.

The crewman had just heard three quick puffs before the bullets struck the orbit just above his right eye. He didn't even have time to react. The nine millimeter bullets pierced the thickest part of his skull and passed several inches further, mangling his brain tissue which burst out of the opposite side of his head, splashing across the bulkhead walls in a pink-red mist. His head snapped to the side as his body spasmed posthumously, and fell to the side, knocking his rifle away as he landed face-down on the floor of the cargo hold.

Color Sergeant Eddie Price heard the bolt lock into place and swiveled his MP5SD to the right, searching for any more targets. "Clear. Let's go."

The team stacked up outside the door, and Bates got ready to breach. All of them reloaded their weapons to have a full magazine in each, to avoid running out of ammunition in the middle of an encounter. Price nodded and gave the order to set a breaching charge on the door. Moving up to the plate, Covington stood in front of the stout steel door and set a double thick charge tied with primacord on the door. It took him a matter of seconds to set the charge, and he gave a thumbs-up afterwards. Ten seconds later the charge detonated, and the door was blown inward. The team, who'd mostly been standing right at the edge, entered with their submachine guns up and scanning the engine room. There was nobody inside. Nobody _alive_, that was. What had once been a man was now on the floor near the door, lying a few meters away from the wrecked door frame. Apparently the crewman had been resting his head right in front of the steel door, and the double thickness of the primacord had brutalized him. Blood poured from what had once been a head, and there was only one shoulder on him.

"Go, find something to kill those engines with! Now!" Price ordered as he searched the two, most recent corpses. After picking up and clearing both their rifles, he stacked them on the floor near where the team had made their entrance.

"Sergeant!" Bates yelled from the left side of the engine room. "The fire hose. Throw it in the reduction gear and we can jam the engines to failure."

"Do it."

Geoff's plan ultimately worked. The sudden introduction of the fire hose to the reduction gear had an immediate effect. A massive screech of metal on metal sounded in the engine room, and the ship was met with an abrupt halt. With a feeling of accomplishment, Price keyed his headset. "This is Color Sergeant Price. We've finished off the engines, requesting immediate extraction."

"Copy sergeant. Any sign of nuclear weapons or components?"

"Negative."

"All right. Extraction helo inbound. You and your team make your way to EZ omega-delta." Eddie's commanding officer in Credenhill answered, hundreds of miles away.

They encountered no resistance on the trip back to the deck. Passing all of the corpses they'd produced during the course of their admittedly short mission, the team made it back to the extraction zone in five minutes. The Night Hawk was already suspended in the air above the bow, and the flight technician threw the same nylon rope over that they'd fast-roped in on. One by one they climbed back into the cabin to safety. The storm had eased up by now, and the sun was doing it's best to pierce the gray of the cloud ceiling of the atmosphere. Eddie and the flight technician helped each of them into the cabin, and when the whole team was on board, the MH-60K turned and flew in the opposite direction. A properly outfitted crew would show up to run through the ship with a fine-tooth comb for whatever had caused the radiation spike. But Price and his team had walked away from another mission, and that was enough for him.

A/N: So there you have it. The byproduct of a teenager with insomnia, the beginning of summer vacation, and too many Jack Ryan novels. :) Seriously though, Red Storm Rising is one of the hardest Clancy books I've ever read. (Still one of the best though.) I wrote this little fic to combine two of my best PS3 games into a cool oneshot. Also, it's a good cure for writer's block. (Progress on my novel is going slow.)

P.S.: Did anybody else wonder why they make you carry the MP5_SD _in that mission in Call of Duty? Seriously, half of the time your team is in a huge firefight with the crew members, and so little consideration is made towards being stealthy. It seams like the MP5SD is a little redundant. Oh well. By the way, kudos to anyone who got the whole "SAS troopers wear gas masks" reference to the 1980 incident in COD4. I thought that was kind of cool of IW to include in the game.


End file.
